Investing Favorites

Newsletters:

Rule Breakers

Investing Expertise

My Area of Expertise:

Extensive experience with many things that do not work. These things, in no particular order are:
1. Setting stop sells on your long positions--doing this caused us to lose some great companies because of short-term issues.
2. Technical Analysis--bought and read several books and eventually got sucked into CNBCU. CNBCU specializes in high "tuition" courses which get you revved up but prepare you for nothing. Add'l payments for longer access to their "advisors" was a bad joke since these people refused to help you interpret their proprietary charts to make decisions about your investments.
3. ValueLine Investment Survey--1700 stocks reviewed quarterly. Rating of 1-5 supposed to provide their recommendations, but you are really on your own. There was very, very, very (did I say very) little in the way of actual analysis of the business such as you see in RB and SA newsletters.
4. Covered Calls--another CNBCU Classic complete with more "tuition." Billed as "safe for retirement accounts. Unless you are skilled in using the various valuation methods, you (like us) will be driven by your gut and your greed, that is, what's the highest premium I can receive without actualy losing my stock? Trust me when I REPEAT that boring adage—you can't time the market. You can't but when you sell a covered call, you are betting you can. We did our what if analyses, and after 2 years of rooting against our best companies (best prospects and for options, highest volality), we concluded that we would have been ahead if we had just held our stocks. Worst decision was selling calls on 300 shares of AAPL we bought for $44 at a strike price of $47.50. We received a few hundred dollars. We thought we were golden because AAPL was going nowhere at the time. Then, maybe a week before expiration, Steve Jobs came back and we were called out. Yes, we could have just bought more shares at $50, but we were not that smart.
5. Lastly, we tried a combination of VL and various methods (from various books recommended by MF) for determining the value of a company and buying it at 60% of its value and then, of course, selling it when it reached full value. This was also a loser. Much of the info you need for these analyses is not available.

Education And Work Information

Pennwalt aka Atochem NA, aka Elf Atochem NA and now known as Arkema--R&D and process engineering

Interests

Personal Quote:

My favorite: "Order is heaven's first law." Alexander Pope.

My Interests:

Making money, home remodelling, gardening, hiking, cooking including making our own bread every week, walking and training our dog, not necessarily in that order--but, #1 is Making Money.

Favorite Restaurants or Foods:

Love all kinds of food

Favorite Vacation Spots:

France

Favorite Sports or Teams:

Football

Favorite Movies:

Casablanca, North by Northwest, Chinatown, On Golden Pond, The African Queen, A Touch of Class, ET, Ratatouille, all Bond movies with Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Many Hitchcock movies, any good mystery, spy or comedy (nothing raunchy).